The video explores the concept of active learning as a core strategy for personal and professional growth. Through the lens of leadership, it highlights how engaging in continuous learning can enhance one's capacity for critical thinking, adaptability, and problem-solving. The episode draws on the experiences of successful individuals and leaders who have harnessed a learning mindset to climb to the top of their fields.

The content discusses the idea that learning is not merely the acquisition of knowledge, but a discipline that involves turning insights into actionable steps. By being an Avid learner, one can create unlimited possibilities, foster relationships, and tackle new challenges. The narrative emphasizes that active learning is crucial for anyone aspiring to Navigate today's dynamic world successfully.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Avid learner [ˈævɪd ˈlɜrnər] - (n.) - A person who is enthusiastic and eager to acquire new knowledge and skills aggressively.

Become an Avid learner, I would say long before the Tomb Raider developers stole my phrase.

2. Pedigree [ˈpɛdəˌgri] - (n.) - The background or history of a person, often referring to their academic achievements or family background.

I didnt have an Ivy League MBA. Like many of my colleagues over the years, what I had was an on the job, learn by doing attitude and the discipline to stay focused on building this skill step by step.

3. Navigate [ˈnævəˌɡeɪt] - (v.) - To find a way through, around, or over; to manage or direct a position or plan.

Embracing a learning mindset enables leaders to overcome challenges and improve decision-making.

4. Infrastructure [ˈɪnfrəˌstrʌktʃər] - (n.) - The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.

the families banded together to create a strong Infrastructure of support.

5. Trajectory [trəˈdʒɛktəri] - (n.) - The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces.

Throughout my life, people have asked if there was a secret to my ability to advance fast in my career, to change the Trajectory of teams and companies...

6. Biases [ˈbaɪəsɪz] - (n.) - Inclinations or prejudices for or against one person or group, especially in a way considered to be unfair.

It helped me overcome natural Biases, be more analytical and more creative, and get better at spotting opportunities and solving problems.

7. Thrive [θraɪv] - (v.) - To grow, develop, or be successful.

It has helped me gain more experience faster like Lara Croft, and helped me survive during the tough times and Thrive during the best times.

8. Autobiography [ˌɔtəˌbaɪˈɑɡrəfi] - (n.) - An account of a person's life written by that person.

This book is your practice manual. It's not an Autobiography...

9. Leapfrog [ˈliˌprɔɡ] - (v.) - To surpass or overtake another to lead or move ahead.

and my active learning skills allowed me to Leapfrog from one opportunity to the next.

10. Persevere [ˌpɜrsəˈvɪr] - (v.) - To continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty; to persist.

If there is a barrier, you go around it, over it or through it, but you dont let it stop you.

Unlocking Leadership through Active Learning Insights

The most pressing task is teaching people how to learn. Peter Drucker introduction learn to discover possibility. Every successful person I've met in my life, and I've spent time with many of the most successful, has learned the discipline of learning. They recognized that it was the only way to expand their potential and the potential of the people around them. They're like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. Probably not where you expected me to go next. When you are playing the game, you can unlock a special survival skill called Avid learner. It helps you earn more experience points every time you uncover important information in the game. It helps you advance faster. I learned this recently when exploring how we talk and think about learning, and it's the perfect explanation of why you need this book, why I'm writing it, and the possibilities it could create for you.

Throughout my life, people have asked if there was a secret to my ability to advance fast in my career, to change the Trajectory of teams and companies and to lead a deeply fulfilling life. The most important thing I tell them isn't really a secret. It has always been learning. Become an Avid learner, I would say long before the Tomb Raider developers stole my phrase. No matter what I'm doing or what goal I'm pursuing, learning has always been my default approach to life and work. It has helped me gain more experience faster like Lara Croft, and helped me survive during the tough times and Thrive during the best times.

I love working with people to discover great ideas and then use those ideas to create possibility and opportunity. When you discover how to incorporate learning into all aspects of your life, to develop it as a daily discipline and vital skill, you'll grow your career, your leadership, your relationships, and your joy and fulfillment too. Formal education can help, but the kind of learning I'm talking about doesn't start or end there, and it's certainly not dependent on the number of degrees you hold or the Pedigree of the schools you attended.

I'm speaking from experience. I was a trailer park kid who lived in 23 states before high school. I was fortunate to attend college, but I didn't have an Ivy League MBA. Like many of my colleagues over the years, what I had was an on the job, learn by doing attitude and the discipline to stay focused on building this skill step by step. I just kept pursuing knowledge, seeking out good ideas, and filling my gaps as I advanced in my career.

My avid learning gave me access to people, experiences, and environments that I sought out. It gave me access to better insights and greater skill building, which helped me develop better ideas. It helped me overcome natural Biases, be more analytical and more creative, and get better at spotting opportunities and solving problems. It helped me take smarter action. I parlayed those advantages into a career of fast growth that ultimately led me to co-found and lead Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and the Habit Burger, and one of the largest corporations in the world.

When I left my position as CEO after nearly two decades, I had to decide where to focus my time, energy, and experience. What am I going to do? What would help me turn my ideas and plans into a life that brought me energy, excitement, and joy? With only a little reflection, the answer was learning. The great Peter Drucker once wrote, the most pressing task is teaching people how to learn. I've taken on the challenge of this pressing task in the work I do and now in this book.

Even for people who are naturally curious and interested in solving problems, being an effective learner who can turn their learning into action takes insight and practice. This book is your practice manual. It's not an Autobiography. It is the collection of wisdom and practical habits from some of the most successful leaders in the world, CEOs from many different industries, military and political leaders, sports greats, experts and coaches, and stories from my own life and career. Chapter by chapter, you'll discover how they've climbed to the highest levels in their respective fields.

Universally, the most successful and happy people and leaders I know, so many of whom you'll be hearing from, operate the same way I do. Learning is their mindset, their differentiating skill, and their approach to life and the world. Now more than ever, with the pace of change in business and the fact that most people change jobs often and even change their careers during their lifetime, a learning discipline isn't just something that's nice to have. It's essential to your success.

And when you discover how to master the pursuit of active learning, you'll see the same results in your life and career. Turning ideas into action when I began working on this book, I realized something was missing in my advice to become an Avid learner, advice so core that it had found its way into my books and my leadership development programs. It might work for Lara Croft in a video game, but in the real world, I came to see that it put learning as the end in itself. It can sound like I'm suggesting you become a living, breathing wiki or Siri in human form, but that's not right.

Imagine if Tom Brady, one of the most voracious learners I've met, knew everything there was to know about how to throw a football to a teammate down the field but never trained his mind and body to do it. Learning by itself isn't enough. You have to focus as much on the action that comes from the learning. So I changed my language. I want to help you become an active learner. An active learner is somebody who seeks out ideas and insights and then pairs them with action and execution.

They learn with purpose. The result is greater possibilities for them and the people around them. I didn't invent the habit of active learning, but I have invested in understanding how to build it and how to use it, especially by studying the many active learners I've met in my life. These days, I talk with them on my podcast, How Leaders Lead with David Novak, people like Indra Nui, Jack Nicklaus, Junior Bridgeman, Bobby Brown, Uri Levine, Ginny Rometti, and so many others. They demonstrate a deep commitment to consistent learning followed by action.

From their experiences and insights captured throughout this book, I've discovered three essential building blocks or behaviors. They learn from anybody and any experience that has something new, interesting, or valuable to offer. They learn to maintain an open, curious mind and positive relationships because we learn the most from and with other people. And they learn by doing the things that need doing or that will make the biggest difference. So powerful is this model that I've structured the whole book around it.

Active learners leverage it to sustain their success, to lead fulfilling lives, and to deepen their connections with other people. Knowing how to learn and how to apply what they learn are skills they've translated as they move from one pursuit to another. You'll see them confidently admit that they don't know everything. You can watch them turn their learning skills inward and use what they find there to coach themselves and grow. And you can identify an active learner by their willingness to tackle new challenges and big problems.

That's how I was able to change lanes and advance faster over the years, moving between roles, functions, and industries without facing too many setbacks or catastrophes. I advanced from a copywriter role at a local ad agency out of college in the mid 1970s to leading a large team serving the Frito Lay account at a national ad agency. From there, with encouragement from others, I became executive vice president of marketing for Pizza Hut in 1986. I was only 34 years old, and I didn't have the degrees that many corporate VPs had.

PepsiCo owned Pizza Hut at the time, and my active learning skills allowed me to Leapfrog from one opportunity to the next. At the company. I became executive vice president of marketing for Pepsi C.O.La, Pepsi Co.'s Beverage division, and then chief operating officer. I was asked to become president of KFC when I was 42. The company then added Pizza Hut to my leadership responsibilities. My successful learning and transformation of these companies led to my eventual position as co-founder and president and eventually CEO of Yum Brands in 1997.

I stayed there for two decades. When I left in 2016, I knew I wanted to help more people become great leaders. So I created David Novak Leadership, invested more in the Lift a Life Novak Family Foundation, and launched my podcast. The work we do across these efforts is helping people learn how to uncover important ideas and turn them into actions that change teams, companies, and the world for the better. All along this journey, I didn't hoard ideas, I spread them. I wanted to help people, teams, and organizations succeed.

I've never met a true active learner who didn't feel compelled to share what they learn, and that's why I'm writing this book. I've met so many people who were never taught to be active learners. How to do it or why it matters. It holds them back and prevents them from fulfilling their potential. I want to inspire you to become an active learner and hone the skills that will help you grow and succeed.

How this book works I've organized this book based on the three keys to transforming your learning into action that I mentioned earlier. Learn from, learn to, and learn by part one learn from is devoted to how we can all learn from the people, environments, and experiences available to us right now. Active learners don't sit around hoping lessons and ideas will show up on their doorstep. They hunt for learning opportunities wherever they are and whoever they are with so that they can make a positive difference now, not later.

I am the product of all the learning opportunities shared with me throughout my life. Through my upbringing, education, coaching, career moves, friends, family, and more, I have absorbed more from others than one person really deserves. I am grateful for that every day. But it wasn't only by chance, it was also by choice, a decision I made every day that drove the actions I took early on in my career. When I was moving into leadership positions, I used to excuse myself and go to the bathroom.

Every time the people I was with started talking about where they'd earned their business degrees, I never felt like I fit in. It also didn't help that I looked even younger than my age, which led me to an embarrassing mustache phase. Eventually, though, I realized that the overconfidence that can come from having a specific Pedigree can also keep you from being open to ideas and possibilities wherever they show up or whatever the source I'm starting with learn from rather than other essential learning skills and habits.

Because if you aren't able to spot opportunities or insights around you, knowing how to learn won't do you much good. You'll hear about how Condoleezza Rice learned from her upbringing in segregated Birmingham, and how Patrick Lenzioni discovered his gaps. I'll share how the members of the dude Perfect team improved their ideas by being truth tellers and what Oscar Munoz learned from the United Airlines Flight 3411 crisis. These stories and others will reveal that we're all surrounded by ideas just waiting for us to turn into a solution.

A fix. A way to grow our careers. A way to help our departments or companies. A way to help our communities. A way to make the world better. In part two, learn two I'll explore essential habits for developing open minds and better critical thinking habits so that you can increase the flow of great ideas into your life and improve how you analyze them. I'll lead with the most essential skill for listening how much time do most of us spend really listening with focus and intention when people talk to us?

How often are we instead multitasking, listening with assumptions, or just thinking about what we're going to have for lunch every day? People share great ideas that go nowhere because nobody's actively listening. If you can become the one who does listen, you'll have incredible potential for positive impact. The biggest hurdle most of us face in becoming active learners is our own brain, which creates roadblocks to new ideas. We carry innate Biases that we don't always recognize. We like to be right a lot more than we like to be wrong, and our brains are good at convincing us that we are.

We tend to focus on the negative, which helps us survive, but also shuts us off from opportunity. We can overcome these limitations, though, by asking better questions, checking our judgments, and developing pattern thinking and other behaviors that expand our sphere of influence. As you listen, you'll learn about Jamie Dimond's habits for developing better instincts, how Ken Chenault, former CEO of American Express, overcame the Ken Zone, and how Lauren Hobart, CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods, turns to people on the front lines of customer service for the best ideas.

I've mentioned people several times already in this book, and we're only in the introduction. You can probably guess that I am a people person, and I believe that developing people skills and being an active learner go hand in hand. Being curious about, open to, and appreciative of ideas means being curious about, open to, and appreciative of people. It means sharing credit and trusting in their positive intentions. I'll explore those essentials in this part of the book, too. In part three, learn by we'll explore the nuances of learning by pursuing joy, simplifying, solving problems, prioritizing people, recognizing others on purpose, and much more.

When we learn by doing, we're discovering the insights that come from action. Some of those insights are about us, some are about others, and some are about the world around us. Learn by also gives us the greatest opportunities for growth. When we learn by seeking out new challenges, doing the hard things, or teaching what we've learned to others, we stretch ourselves. Instead of incremental growth, we make big leaps in what we know, what we're capable of, and our tolerance for the discomfort that comes from putting ourselves out there.

Like the time I put myself forward for the chief operating officer role at Pepsi Cola. With almost no operations experience, without a formal education in business or marketing, my early career path I've had to learn by doing. Which is the best way to learn. Though I've had some amazing teachers, virtually every boss I've had went on to run a big company, for example, a lot of what I've learned was self-taught. Sometimes that's the only way to learn. Sometimes there's nobody to ask. No YouTube video to watch, no instruction manual to read.

A when, for example, Marvin Ellison was the only person at the headquarters of Lowes who had his experience in the stores or who looked like him, he had to learn to throw his true self forward. You'll also hear about why Jim Nance, award-winning sports commentator, never outsources research and preparation, and why Anil Bushri, one of the co-founders and CEO of Workday, personally interviewed the first 500 people the company hired. The importance of learning by doing is especially true for successful creators and innovators who are, without exception, active learners.

When I started out on the journey of writing this book, my editor and I began by learning. We went to school on one of the best-selling books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dell Carnegie. The book you're listening to now is structured a lot like Carnegie's. The chapters are short, driven by stories, and gathered into parts based on an active theme. Because what we learned from Carnegie's example was the power of creating a book that could be consumed in 15 minutes increments and deliver something of value and impact with each byte.

We learned that it's okay to give people the freedom to jump to any chapter they feel like using. You can listen straight through or start anywhere you like. And we learned that the best way to deliver insights is through candid stories that move and entertain. So that's what I've tried to do. Finally, I wrap up each chapter with questions designed to help you turn the big idea into active learning in your own life. As you continue listening, my hope is that you learn about you, how you learn best, what learning moments have had the biggest impact in your life and where you have opportunities to grow your learning capacity and capabilities.

Self-discovery is the key to acquiring knowledge. I use that term self-discovery in two ways. It's the act of learning about yourself and the act of coming up with ideas on your own. Use the questions at the end of the chapters to reflect on what I've shared and then draw your own conclusions or develop your own ideas. That's really what separates active learners from the rest of the world. They get so excited by the process of learning itself because they know what they learned will be useful to help them grow.

Taking on the role of active learner will lead you to places you never thought you could go. It will reveal possibilities you never imagined. It's as Eric Hoffer, the American philosopher, wrote in Reflections on the Human Condition. In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. They can't wait to discover the next idea. And the next, and the next. Because behind every idea is a world of possibility and a brighter future. I'm excited to see what possibilities this book will bring to your life.

Let's see where the first idea takes you. Chapter one trailer Park University learn from your upbringing. My family was one of 15 attached to the US Coast and Geodetic Survey team. My dad's job was to mark latitudes and longitudes for the nation's mapmakers. The team needed him wherever it needed to make new maps. So every few months, we'd pack up, hitch our trailers to the back of big government trucks, and move on to a new town so he could mark new latitudes and longitudes. Imagine a circus caravan without the elephants, but with the same great sense of anticipation.

New terrain to explore, a new lake or stream to swim in. When people ask me where I'm from, I say, well, that's kind of a long story, because I grew up in trailer parks across the country, wherever my dad had to go. I had lived in 23 states by the time I was in 7th grade. It probably sounds to most of you like a tough way to grow up. I didn't always mind it. The sense of adventure was always there. And because the 15 families moved together, we took our neighborhood with us. So we had community.

Even with the constant moving. And because of the constant moving and what that meant for us as kids, leaving friends behind and rarely seeing our own extended families, the families banded together to create a strong Infrastructure of support. When I played baseball, for example, about 20 people extended family would show up to watch. Everyone else on the team was lucky to get both their parents there, and I'd have a whole cheering section.

It took me decades to see the connection between those experiences and how I operated in my life and career, especially as a leader. For instance, I didn't understand the influence the support of the survey team families had on me when I was a kid because it was my normal. But it made me feel cared for, appreciated, and special. And I learned that making other people feel that way was one of the most significant things I could do in life. Showing my support for and recognition of people, their good work, their ideas became my guiding star.

In her great book Insight, Tasha Uric writes about the critical skill of self-awareness and how to build it. She explains that self-aware people understand their values, aspirations, passions, the environments where they are happiest, their patterns of behavior, their reactions, and the effect they have on others. Throughout this book, I'll come back to some of these elements because one of the most powerful things we can learn in life is who we are. Our upbringings are goldmines of information, though, so why not start there?

Our upbringings shape us, the good and bad experiences, the normal experiences of our day-to-day lives. When you choose to learn from your upbringing, you learn who you are, your strengths and weaknesses, your unique perspective, and your blind spots. Being an active learner means being a historian of your own life. So start by reflecting on your past, beginning with your earliest experiences and influences. Hunt for insights about what you value, how you think, and what Biases you might hold. You might discover why you feel affinity towards certain people or ideas. All of this self-knowledge will expand your capacity for learning in the present.

There are many ways to do this historical scan. One I like comes from psychologist Dan McAdams, who has focused most of his research and work on what our life stories can tell us about who we are. He helped develop a technique called the guided Autobiography, asking people to identify important events in their lives and then asking thought-provoking questions about those events. The most revealing questions why do you think this is an important event in your life story? What does this event say about who you are, who you were, who you might be, or how you have developed over time?

I've done a similar exercise throughout my life as a leader, sketching my lifeline, including the important experiences and the high points and low points. Next to each critical experience, I note the impact it had on me and what I learned. This process has taught me that I have not succeeded in life. In spite of my nomadic upbringing, I have succeeded because of it. Being born in the United States to loving and supporting parents Charles and Gene Novak was my biggest break in life. Next to my high point of being raised by my mom and dad, I write mentor and coach.

My dad was my first coach and my mother was my first mentor. Having my community in the stands during games mattered, but my parents played the biggest role in developing my focus on people. They modeled what it looked like to be a good coach and mentorous, and they emphasized the importance of building relationships early and often. Even as an older adult. Every time I was a guest commentator on CNBC's squawk box, they would watch and then call and tell me how great I did. I remember how every time we arrived in a new town, my mother would take me to the local school and say, look, David, you've got to take the initiative to make friends. Don't hang back and wait for the other kids to come to.

You were only going to be here for a few months, so make them count. With her advice and our nomadic life, I learned that you were only ever one friend away from happiness. I carried that idea with me into every new work environment throughout my career. Of course, that didn't entirely take away my anxiety of going in cold to a new school, but it did help me walk through the fear and get on with it. Once there, what made all the difference was the first person to acknowledge me in some way, the first kid to be brave enough to say hi or ask where we had come from.

I learned that anybody who tries to make others feel more comfortable in a new situation is generally a good human being, and I've tried to be that person for others whenever possible, especially in my leadership roles. I don't want to make my childhood sound idyllice. We certainly struggled sometimes, and in some towns we weren't wealthy. We had to work hard for the things we had. My father left us a few summers to take higher-paying and more dangerous jobs in remote places like the wilds of Alaska.

Few important stories from our lives are straightforward or simple, all good or all bad. Recognizing that is something Tasha Urich highlights as an important sign of self-awareness. In her book, self-aware people tend to knit more complex narratives of their key life events. They are more likely to describe each event from different perspectives, include multiple explanations, and explore complex and even contradictory emotions. Instead of searching for simple, generalizable facts, self-aware people appreciate the complicated nature of the key events in their lives.

Perhaps for this reason, complex life stories are associated with continued personal growth and maturity years into the future. I've seen this same kind of nuanced storytelling or self-awareness from so many of the active learners I've met when they talk about their upbringings. Indra Newey, the former CEO of PepsiCo, told me a story of learning from her mother to be both aspirational and competitive. When she was young, her mother gave Indra and her siblings a task. At dinner, for example, she'd say, give me a speech about what you would do if you were the prime minister of the country.

At the end of dinner, when they had all given their speeches, her mother chose the best speech and handed out the prize, a tiny piece of chocolate. Her mother never tried to make sure that every kid won at least once or gave the prize in turns every time. She gave the chocolate to the person who had delivered the best speech. Reflecting on this, Indra said, today, you give me a bar of chocolate, a giant bar of chocolate, and it doesn't taste as good as that tiny, tiny bit of chocolate.

The stories James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, shared of learning from his father's raised bar are funnier, at least from a distance of a few decades, but helped him develop a deep sense of both humility and independence. He is an Australian who grew up as one of ten children. What it teaches you is that you're not that special, he said. There's somebody who's smarter, somebody who's more athletic, somebody who's funnier, somebody who's better looking. And then there's his father. His methods might not align with modern parenting advice, but they certainly made James both humble and self-reliant when it came to his own success.

When James was young, his father gave all the kids an IQ test and then posted the results on the living room door in order. Next to each, he listed their likely career potential. Next to James Middling score, he wrote middle management. His father also made it clear that all the kids would support themselves financially from the moment they turned 18, including figuring out how to pay for college. James worked three jobs while getting his degree, including cleaning the toilets in his dorm.

Condoleezza Rice will tell you that she has a positive perspective on her upbringing, despite the fact that it came with more challenges than most people's. I always say something that's maybe a little bit paradoxical, which is that I'm actually glad I grew up in segregated Birmingham. She told me she was nine years old when the Civil Rights Act passed. Before then, she lived in a small community full of adults, many of whom were schoolteachers, who sent two clear messages. First, you are going to have to be twice as good to succeed in a segregated environment.

Second, you may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your response to those circumstances. If you respond as a victim, then you have given control of your life over to someone else. Those two lessons were a kind of armor in their way of preparing us for what they thought was likely to be a very hostile world for a long time to come. If there is a barrier, you go around it, over it, or through it, but you don't let it stop you. I learned that in the circumstances of segregated Birmingham, and I'm grateful because I took those lessons into life with me.

Those lessons of both self-respect and personal responsibility influenced how she responded to challenging circumstances. She began her career as a Soviet military specialist and was a unique presence in a lot of rooms. She tried to make being included a two-way street, their responsibility and hers. She quickly showed people that she belonged there, but she also made the effort to bring down the potential tension level.

As a young professor, she got a one-year fellowship to work for the strategic nuclear planning division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was three things they had never seen, she told me. Female, black, and civilian. The first day they said the rookie makes the coffee. Now I could have said I'm a professor at Stanford. I don't make coffee. I made the coffee. The truth is I make coffee so strong nobody can drink it. They never asked me again. It lowered the temperature. And then the next week I won the football pool.

Now we had something to talk about on Monday mornings and pretty soon I was just real comfortable with them. And they were real comfortable with me. What about the stories you tell from your life and your upbringing? Have you mined them for the deeper, more complex insights into who you are and how you think and behave? Have you learned about your strengths and blind spots? If you haven't, you may be limiting what you can learn now.

You may be at risk of repeating patterns that don't serve you well. For instance, so much of my unusual childhood would serve me well in life, but it especially contributed to one of my greatest strengths, which is being comfortable with and excited about change. But it could also be a weakness if I let it blind me to the fact that not everybody approaches the world in the same way. On my resume, you'll see one example of this. I changed jobs often. I was always looking for the next growth opportunity.

I never thought twice about packing up the proverbial trailer and moving to the next site. That sensibility, paired with my ambition, contributed to my career success. But you are not going to make everybody happy when you move in and out of jobs. Even though I grew up with a strong focus on people and relationships, I have also blindly assumed that those around me were ready to jump into the truck and head to the next town too, without taking their feelings into consideration.

One of the most important roles of my career was Senior Vice President of Marketing for Pizza Hut. After more than a decade working for outside agencies, it was my first job inside a large company. Steve Reinemant, president of Pizza Hut, took a chance and hired me. Despite the fact that I had no experience in the restaurant industry, he championed me from day one and took the time to teach me everything he knew about the business, which was a lot. His risk and investment paid off, though.

Over three years, I helped double sales and profits and turn around the delivery business. Because of my team's success, Roger Enrico, CEO of PepsiCo Worldwide Beverages, asked me to come over to the beverage division as Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales. It was a big move because everybody knew how core the beverage division was to the company, and it was a great learning opportunity. It also meant leaving Wichita, Kansas, for New York, a hotbed of networking and career opportunities.

I jumped at the chance, probably a little too quickly. Steve Reinemand at Pizza Hut wasn't happy. He didn't have an obvious replacement for me. I didn't involve him much in my discussions with Roger Enrico, and even though he had been a wonderful coach and mentor, I didn't seek his counsel as I was considering the move. He wasn't in the dark about the situation, but I handed him the decision as a done deal. He had given me the biggest break in my career, and I owed him a lot more sensitivity than I had given him.

I simply wasn't aware enough that the kind of ease with change and moving on I had developed all the way back in elementary school wasn't innate to everyone. It took us a while to re-establish our great relationship after that, and it took years for me to learn that I had to slow down, not get ahead of myself, and make sure I put myself in other people's shoes.

Our biggest influences may have been our parents, teachers, coaches, friends, social workers, an entire community or society. We may have had easier upbringings or tougher upbringings. No matter who or what influenced us in the past, we can learn from those experiences because the best gift any of us can give ourselves is to know thyself.

Learning from your upbringing who in your life has had the greatest impact on your values, goals, worldview, confidence? Map the peaks and valleys in your lifeline. What can you learn from each? What's one story from your early years that proves what you are capable of when you take a learning perspective?

Education, Leadership, Inspiration, Active Learning, Personal Growth, Yum Brands